SSD Wear off in M1 MacBooks

[maverick786us]

I bought a 16 Inch M1 MacBook Pro with 1TBSSD and 16GB RAM. I shared this good news with my friend, he warned me that I should have waited for M2 MacBook Pros, there is an issue with M1 MacBook pros where the SSD wears off quickly because of unified memory process. He said that apple issued an upgrade which solved this issue but its hardware fault so it cannot be sorted

Initially I took his word with a pinch of salt, but I searched on internet and came across articles related to this. Is this issue was M1 Pro chipsets too? MacBook models that has 16GB RAM too had this issue?

 

[UnknownSouljer]

I bought a 16 Inch M1 MacBook Pro with 1TBSSD and 16GB RAM. I shared this good news with my friend, he warned me that I should have waited for M2 MacBook Pros, there is an issue with M1 MacBook pros where the SSD wears off quickly because of unified memory process. He said that apple issued an upgrade which solved this issue but its hardware fault so it cannot be sorted

Initially I took his word with a pinch of salt, but I searched on internet and came across articles related to this. Is this issue was M1 Pro chipsets too? MacBook models that has 16GB RAM too had this issue?

The issue is having low RAM and having to use the SSD as cache back and forth. I have yet to see even a video showing how this wear has affected anyone in the short term. And nothing but best guesses as to how it will affect machines in the long term.

I will say that in theory if your RAM pool is large enough, then you should never have to cache to the SSD anyway. That's the "cure". Is 16GB enough to minimize caching in all the apps you do? Probably.

EDIT: unless you do lots of 4k video editing, but I'll assume that you're not doing intensive tasks in general if you felt that 16GB of RAM was enough.

 

[somebrains]

You can install smartmontools if the health check doesn’t satisfy you.
OS behavior will affect your drive more than different NAND.
Historically the first and I think second gens of Air would famously be seen used with dead drives due to MacOS and 4gb ram base models.

Hardware isn't that fragile, there's so much work issued gear that gets treated like the employees hates the device that survive fine.

 

[pendragon1]

Hardware isn't that fragile, there's so much work issued gear that gets treated like the employees hates the device that survive fine.

lol this ^^ so much. we havent have anything but broken screens with any of the 1000s of M1 based airs or pros we have in our school division. and all the broken screens were from what i mentioned to you in your other thread, someone sandwiching something.

 

[Dreamerbydesign]

The first gen M1 airs have been out some years now. If there was a widespread issue I am sure we would know about it. People LOVE to complain about Apple products. I have a 14 Pro M1 Pro, and have not noticed any issues. I also have deployed more than a few M1 airs to some heavy users. In the past 2 years they have had no issues. Anecdotal, but my expereince.

 

[pendragon1]

People LOVE to complain about Apple products

with good reason, but thats for other threads. what we said here, is the reality of it though.

 

[Dreamerbydesign]

with good reason, but thats for other threads. what we said here, is the reality of it though.

All a matter of opinion. Statistics and sales beg to differ. Apple silicon caused and delivered a major shift in an otherwise stale hardware market. But thats for other threads.

 

[maverick786us]

The first gen M1 airs have been out some years now. If there was a widespread issue I am sure we would know about it. People LOVE to complain about Apple products. I have a 14 Pro M1 Pro, and have not noticed any issues. I also have deployed more than a few M1 airs to some heavy users. In the past 2 years they have had no issues. Anecdotal, but my expereince.

There is a reason I love Apple Eco system despite paying premium for all the devices. I always take extra care of my gadgets, not just my acBook but my iPhone and Apple Watch. I bought a heavy laptop bag compromising my comfort and easy while travelling, with the sole purpose that my M1 MacBook Pro 16 remains safe inside it.

The reason I created this thread was not to COMPLAINT, I wanted to know your opinion if some of the SSD controls associated with these M1 / M1 Pro were faulty (God Forbid), when my friend told me about the SSD issue. I know SSD has a limited write cycles, and looking into my MacBook if I do 300GB writes per day the SSD will die in 5 years, and my write usage isn't 1% of it.

 

[Dreamerbydesign]

There is a reason I love Apple Eco system despite paying premium for all the devices. I always take extra care of my gadgets, not just my acBook but my iPhone and Apple Watch. I bought a heavy laptop bag compromising my comfort and easy while travelling, with the sole purpose that my M1 MacBook Pro 16 remains safe inside it.

The reason I created this thread was not to COMPLAINT, I wanted to know your opinion if some of the SSD controls associated with these M1 / M1 Pro were faulty (God Forbid), when my friend told me about the SSD issue. I know SSD has a limited write cycles, and looking into my MacBook if I do 300GB writes per day the SSD will die in 5 years, and my write usage isn't 1% of it.

Oh it wasn’t directed at you. It was a general statement about people (who almost always never own Apple devices) complain about them. Your numerous threads about this MacBook purchase don’t seem at all to be complaining.

I meant random internet threads and loose evidence baked into an article for click bait ad money.

Personally I’ve exclusively bought and used Apple devices for all of my portable computing needs for many years now. They have been the only laptop that has lasted me besides my older Thinkpads. Some people knee jerk over the price of MacBooks and some just hate on Apple because that’s the cool thing to do on the internet. Very few people offer up and real reason or admit to disliking them after owning them for a decent period of time. But that’s all just subjective.

 

[maverick786us]

Oh it wasn’t directed at you. It was a general statement about people (who almost always never own Apple devices) complain about them. Your numerous threads about this MacBook purchase don’t seem at all to be complaining.

I meant random internet threads and loose evidence baked into an article for click bait ad money.

Personally I’ve exclusively bought and used Apple devices for all of my portable computing needs for many years now. They have been the only laptop that has lasted me besides my older Thinkpads. Some people knee jerk over the price of MacBooks and some just hate on Apple because that’s the cool thing to do on the internet. Very few people offer up and real reason or admit to disliking them after owning them for a decent period of time. But that’s all just subjective.

I moved into apple eco system, way back in 2014 when I bought first generation iPad Air that was my first tablet and last because after buying MacBook Pro 2015, I didn't feel the need of a tablet unless I have to some drawing, hand writing which requires a pencil, iPhone 6s plus was the transition from windows phone (Nokia N Series N950) to iOS, in 2018 I bought an iPhone XS Max and now i own 12 Pro Max, my first apple watch was series 2 in 2018 and now I bought a 3 months old used golden color stainless steel Series 6 and I gifted a used aluminum Series 6 watch to my old man .

All my devices never had any issue except for speaker cracking and dead pixels in my old MacBook Pro, my iPad is still alive and is in working condition, though its hardware is outdated and obsolete. When it comes to quality and reliability, I will definitely put apple on top of all any other products. About after sales support I don't know because I never came across any issue with my apple products within the warranty period. The MacBook issue was when it was already 2 years old and the warranty had expired and it was because of this issue that I bought the new M1 MacBook Pro 16.

Talking about COMPLAINT, yes, I find the price if iPhone Pro Max series, unjustifiable something so small and it costs more than a medium spec latest generation MacBook Pro. It simply doesn't justify the cost. The production (parts and labor) cost of an iPhone 14 Pro Max is not even 25% compared to the production cost of a 13 M1 MacBook Air and it costs 30-35% more than it.

 

[somebrains]

with good reason, but thats for other threads. what we said here, is the reality of it though.

To be fair, 2015 retinas did get a free screen replacement bc of peeling coatings and white spots appearing on their own.
I had one, I know there was a model before that and after with panel issues.
We can count the years of bad keyboards 2016-2019.
2019 intel 16” with very specific options seem to fry.
There have been various bad battery runs.
Gen 1 and 2 Airs killed their ssds.

M1 and M2 has been good so far.

I beat my gear like I hate it.
I was running AWS localstack before the recent updates trying to torch it.
I was running a couple art generators simultaneously.
I run Python, C, and C++ benchmark builds just to see if updates produce more rows or if I can verify regressions.
VS code has piles of JavaScript projects and node instances will stack up bc I forget to kill them forcing me to rethink how many ports I’m assigning them.
I’ll play with creative apps for documentation.
I screen record almost daily.

My Air lives most of the time in yellow memory pressure.
Cpu, gpu, and storage aren’t constantly being hit all day in comparison.

They’re great little laptops.

If I was only writing code, I didn’t value the interoperability of apple devices, I could just distro hop as needed for projects pushing builds and stuffing $ in my pocket in a back alley then the Thinkpad is better.

 

[pendragon1]

To be fair, 2015 retinas did get a free screen replacement bc of peeling coatings and white spots appearing on their own.
I had one, I know there was a model before that and after with panel issues.
We can count the years of bad keyboards 2016-2019.
2019 intel 16” with very specific options seem to fry.
There have been various bad battery runs.
Gen 1 and 2 Airs killed their ssds.

M1 and M2 has been good so far.

I beat my gear like I hate it.
I was running AWS localstack before the recent updates trying to torch it.
I was running a couple art generators simultaneously.
I run Python, C, and C++ benchmark builds just to see if updates produce more rows or if I can verify regressions.
VS code has piles of JavaScript projects and node instances will stack up bc I forget to kill them forcing me to rethink how many ports I’m assigning them.
I’ll play with creative apps for documentation.
I screen record almost daily.

My Air lives most of the time in yellow memory pressure.
Cpu, gpu, and storage aren’t constantly being hit all day in comparison.

They’re great little laptops.

If I was only writing code, I didn’t value the interoperability of apple devices, I could just distro hop as needed for projects pushing builds and stuffing $ in my pocket in a back alley then the Thinkpad is better.

to be fair, if you had read what i wrote and was replying to, youd realize i/we were talking specifically about the m1 series. hence "with good reason, but thats for other threads." yet you ramble on in this thread...

 

[alienb]

This honestly sounds like some Apple-store bullshit to get you to buy the worse-performing base model M2s.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

This honestly sounds like some Apple-store bullshit to get you to buy the worse-performing base model M2s.

The base M2 performs better in all tasks other than specifically I/O intensive tasks. The types of tasks people run on a daily basis aren't tasks that benefit from increased I/O.
In fact, we've talked about this topic to death in the news forum, and frankly all the testing shows that if you were given either of these machines to A/B test, you wouldn't be able to tell casually. You'd have to essentially run a benchmark side by side to even know. And all testing via a myriad of sites bare this out.

2700MB/s is not slow. The 20-30% uplift from M2 is much more significant than the "loss of" base M1 SSD. And if you actually want or need the performance, you'd simply buy the machine with a larger SSD anyway, which basically every power user would do. I haven't used a machine with less than 1TB of SSD in 10 years at this point.
This is really just a point of complaint for people not using these machines. I would rate the number of people actually affected at either zero or statistically insignificantly above zero (less than 2 standard deviations).

 

[alienb]

"Simply buy the performance you want" and a deliberate downgrade in base model performance to be less than half of the previous generation....ehhhh, not buying that, sorry.


General use? No, probably not, but most users aren't buying these over a MBA or a 13" for just the screen upgrade, considering the premium.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

"Simply buy the performance you want" and a deliberate downgrade in base model performance to be less than half of the previous generation....ehhhh, not buying that, sorry.

Okay, I'll say the same thing I said in the other thread: produce the use case in which this matters for you. And feel free to show the benchmarks showing those use cases rather than what you theoretically think matters or not. (Heavy emphasis on non-synthetic).

General use? No, probably not, but most users aren't buying these over a MBA or a 13" for just the screen upgrade, considering the premium.

Planning on buying a base level Macbook Pro M2 Pro 14/16?

 

[alienb]

Actually, I bought a M1 14 base model.

 

[alienb]

Also: even synthetic benches being somewhere around 50% performance loss EVEN SYNTHETIC would be enough to cause me serious pause if I was considering a newer gen model. That "Matters to me"

For me, primarily regular work/online/school media consumption, etc, it seemed like a slam-dunk considering the screen quality over the M1/2 Air or 13", given the huge performance boosts per dollar, (Paid about $1525 with tax out the door for an "open box") I didn't see the need to get marginally better CPU performance, (synthetic benches, which are fine to use here I guess?) with no improvement on any other metric - it just isn't worth it to ME.

That said, I don't have a problem with people wanting to buy the latest and greatest, I'm one of them. However, Apple does shady/questionable at best things with their product refresh lines, and saving $.50 overall BOM cost and almost halving disk performance is a non-starter for me.

Maybe the m1 MBP 14/16 was never intended to have this level of performance, and they just "got stuck" with putting two chips on the M1 series and had to keep it for consistency across the SKU line? I don't know. But at least an explanation from Apple, (even in a targeted leak, unofficially) would have gone a long way here.


Anyway, nothing against you. I really hate Apple as a company and detest a lot of their business practices, but own a laptop, phone, tablet, media player, etc from them.

You CAN buy into the ecosystem without drinking the kool-aid.

 

[Aurelius]

Also: even synthetic benches being somewhere around 50% performance loss EVEN SYNTHETIC would be enough to cause me serious pause if I was considering a newer gen model. That "Matters to me"

For me, primarily regular work/online/school media consumption, etc, it seemed like a slam-dunk considering the screen quality over the M1/2 Air or 13", given the huge performance boosts per dollar, (Paid about $1525 with tax out the door for an "open box") I didn't see the need to get marginally better CPU performance, (synthetic benches, which are fine to use here I guess?) with no improvement on any other metric - it just isn't worth it to ME.

That said, I don't have a problem with people wanting to buy the latest and greatest, I'm one of them. However, Apple does shady/questionable at best things with their product refresh lines, and saving $.50 overall BOM cost and almost halving disk performance is a non-starter for me.

Maybe the m1 MBP 14/16 was never intended to have this level of performance, and they just "got stuck" with putting two chips on the M1 series and had to keep it for consistency across the SKU line? I don't know. But at least an explanation from Apple, (even in a targeted leak, unofficially) would have gone a long way here.


Anyway, nothing against you. I really hate Apple as a company and detest a lot of their business practices, but own a laptop, phone, tablet, media player, etc from them.

You CAN buy into the ecosystem without drinking the kool-aid.

The most likely answer is probably the boring one: Apple was reportedly going to have trouble sourcing lower-capacity NAND chips, and so decided that one large chip at reduced performance was better than taking the risk of shortages (or, more cynically, raising the base storage and taking a hit to profit margins). Still not ideal, but not as malicious as some think.

Me, I just hope Apple raises the minimum storage to 512GB the next time around. We're getting to the point where 256GB is thin unless you stream absolutely everything. Well, that and I'd like 16GB of RAM to be included on more non-Pro Macs.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Also: even synthetic benches being somewhere around 50% performance loss EVEN SYNTHETIC would be enough to cause me serious pause if I was considering a newer gen model. That "Matters to me"

Right, but that is specifically missing the point. The reason why I stated "real world" is precisely because synthetic benchmarks are misleading. There has repeatedly been a large amount of complaining about 'speed' without anyone being able to tell the difference regarding speed without pulling up a synthetic test.

From my perspective: "things that don't matter, matter to you", said in a concise way. In all that time you had to look for something, there wasn't even a single real world test you could bring up that would've made an actual difference in workflow. Meanwhile the 20% increase in M2 Pro vs M1 Pro performance is measurable across not only every synthetic benchmark, but also over every real world one as well.

For me, primarily regular work/online/school media consumption, etc, it seemed like a slam-dunk considering the screen quality over the M1/2 Air or 13", given the huge performance boosts per dollar, (Paid about $1525 with tax out the door for an "open box") I didn't see the need to get marginally better CPU performance, (synthetic benches, which are fine to use here I guess?) with no improvement on any other metric - it just isn't worth it to ME.

Absolutely. That's a $500~ haircut. But at that point I don't think the decision making at all had anything to do with performance. It was all about cost. You weighed 20% benefit in speed vs 25% decrease in cost and decided which had more value for you. Had both systems costed the same I highly doubt the choice would've been nearly as black and white.

And contrary to your ending statement, there is plenty of real world speed increases on M2/M2 Pro over their M1 counterparts. Spend 10 minutes on any review for verification. Apple is definitely not selling a system that has parity of performance with last gen for the same price.

Anyway, nothing against you. I really hate Apple as a company and detest a lot of their business practices, but own a laptop, phone, tablet, media player, etc from them.

You CAN buy into the ecosystem without drinking the kool-aid.

That's very far afield from how I view the company. Apple is just the best, least offensive, alternative that does what I want and need with their hardware/software package. I like their products, yes. But like every corporation they're in it for themselves.

More to the point, if you hate Apple and buy Microsoft and Samsung/Android (Google) instead, you're fooling yourself. If this is about companies that "aren't evil" or are more or less morally offensive then that ship has sailed. They all have terrible track records. So I'd say that being a fan of any of these companies is "drinking the kool-aid"; but for some reason people who use Apple products get called out on it disproportionately more than if you like Samsung, Google, or Microsoft, all of whom have just as bad or worse track records in significantly bigger markets.